If you’re a Unix geek, you’ve probably used bash, the Bourne-Again Shell. If you’ve been around a while, you’ve probably spent a lot of time customizing bash.

Back when I worked for Yahoo!, my friend Bryan gave me a great directory stack for bash. I loved it, so I rewrote it and have been hacking on it and using it ever since. Observe.

[user@host:~]$ cd /tmp
[user@host:/tmp]$ cd /var/log
[user@host:/var/log]$ dl
1   ~
2   /tmp
3 * /var/log
[user@host:/var/log]$ go 1
1   /home/user
[user@host:~]$ go log
3   /var/log
[user@host:/var/log]$

In addition to the handy new go command, it also includes b and f for moving backwards and forwards on the stack. It was inspired by pushd and popd, but it’s so much more.

Not this kind of shell.

If you’d like to check it out, take a look at my bashtools repository on GitHub or just download version 1.0. I don’t change it very often, but I’m thinking of hammering out a long-standing bug in the directory stack code.

N.B. If you use all of my scripts, you’ll get some great prompts for your xterms. You’re welcome!